The scramble over Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues amid pending decisions from EA, CMA (UK) and FTC (US). Sony now had to put up with a sensitive defeat.
In the context of Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, fighting is going on with hard bandages. Sony in particular likes to play the victim role at the moment should the takeover take place. Recently, it was claimed, among other things, that the deal would result in fewer exclusive titles due to reduced revenue from Call of Duty. For whatever reason.
Now, however, Sony had to take a beating. As part of the investigation by the American FTC, Microsoft had requested access to the competitor’s documents in order to substantiate its own defense. So far, Sony has defended itself tooth and nail and even accused Microsoft of harassment.
However, the FTC’s chief administrative judge, D. Michael Chappell, has now dismissed a large part of Sony’s objections. The rationale reads: “Microsoft argues that the complaint in this case contains a number of allegations of exclusivity agreements between developers of high-performance video game consoles and video game publishers. Microsoft states that it is aware that SIE requires many third-party publishers to provide exclusivity provisions that they et al., from including their games on the Xbox multi-game subscription service, and that knowing the full extent of SIE’s exclusivity agreements and their impact on industry competitiveness will be helpful to his defense.”
This leaves Microsoft free to dig into some very interesting Sony documents, which the Playstation maker will certainly not like, especially as it could unearth some data on exclusive deals.
And it gets worse, because according to current reports, the EU Commission is about to approve the takeover. The two announced deals with Nintendo (Call of Duty on their platforms) and NVIDIA (Microsoft games on GeForce NOW) are said to have been the decisive factor. According to the current status, an official statement should be published by April 25 at the latest.
